Some … glorious day,
I’m going to write … a
poem about the night … I
stayed up,
tracing the smile on your face as you slept.
And it’s going to be
beautiful
and serene!

“Absence extinguishes mediocre passions and inflames great ones; as the wind will blow out a candle, and fan a fire.” (translated from french) François VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld, le Prince de Marcillac.

Considered an indicator of self-awareness, mirror self-recognition (MSR) has long seemed limited to humans and apes. In both phylogeny and human ontogeny, MSR is thought to correlate with higher forms of empathy and altruistic behavior. Apart from humans and apes, dolphins and elephants are also known for such capacities. After the recent discovery of MSR in dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), elephants thus were the next logical candidate species. We exposed three Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) to a large mirror to investigate their responses. Animals that possess MSR typically progress through four stages of behavior when facing a mirror: (i) social responses, (ii) physical inspection (e.g., looking behind the mirror), (iii) repetitive mirror-testing behavior, and (iv) realization of seeing themselves. Visible marks and invisible sham-marks were applied to the elephants’ heads to test whether they would pass the litmus “mark test” for MSR in which an individual spontaneously uses a mirror to touch an otherwise imperceptible mark on its own body. Here, we report a successful MSR elephant study and report striking parallels in the progression of responses to mirrors among apes, dolphins, and elephants. These parallels suggest convergent cognitive evolution most likely related to complex sociality and cooperation.

This is the abstract of a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It’s a big news story, and as always it’s nice to see how reporters play it. Anyhow, this post is just to let you know that you can access three movies of the elephants infront of the mirror from the Supporting Information page (subs. reqrd. (?)). (If you’re really interested, and can’t access them for one reason or another, email me and we’ll find a way.)

Via Arabist:

Activists are organizing a sit in at the Press Syndicate, 12 noon, on 9 November, to protest the sexual assaults against women during Eid. The activists are demanding the resignation of General Habib el-Adly, the Interior Minister whose security forces stood by watching the assaults without intervention.